[BRIEF NOTE] On Harper's personally convenient postponing of Canadian democracy

[rfmcdonald]

Wow. I'd no idea that Harper would prorogue Parliament a second time, this time without fears of a threatening coalition government to replace his.

Opposition politicians lambasted Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision Wednesday to suspend Parliament for the next two months as a politically opportunistic and despotic attempt to avoid scrutiny.

“Mr. Harper is showing that his first impulse when he is in trouble is to shut down Parliament,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said in the wake of news that Parliament had been prorogued.

But the government maintained that its decision to not have Parliament sit through most of the winter was a routine move that would allow for a two-week parliamentary truce during the Winter Olympics in February.

The move will kill dozens of the government's own bills, while leaving in limbo a parliamentary inquiry into Afghan detainees. It will also pave the way for Conservative control of the Senate.

And prorogation sets up a number of confidence votes on economic issues in the spring, at which point the opposition will determine whether Canada goes to the polls for a third time in four years.

Mr. Harper called Governor-General Michaëlle Jean Wednesday morning to ask her to give a Speech from the Throne on March 3 – delaying Parliament's return by 22 sitting days – and allowing the government to table a budget on March 4.

More than 30 bills will die on the order paper, with more than half of them part of the government's tough-on-crime agenda. But the Prime Minister's Office said the goal is to continue focusing on the economy, with consultations on budgetary matters in the next two months.

“This is the time to recalibrate, consult and deliver the next stage of our plan that we outlined last year in Budget 2009,” said spokesman Dimitri Soudas.

He said that Canada has done relatively well during the recent global recession, but said “we're not out of the woods yet.”

Mr. Soudas added the government will file five vacancies in the Senate in the near future, providing the Conservatives with more seats than the Liberals in the Upper Chamber.

New Senate committees will be formed when Parliament is reconvened, putting the Conservatives in the driver's seat for the first time since Mr. Harper came to power in 2006. The government will still be short of an outright majority in the 105-seat Senate, given the presence of five independents, but will enjoy a “governing minority” with 51 seats.

But the opposition is particularly angry that the government, through prorogation, is shutting down the parliamentary committee into the treatment of Afghan detainees.

At this point I have to agree with James Bow ("The Real Canadian Coup D'Etat") and his three conclusions (bullet-pointing mine, italics to be assumed by the reader, sentiments wholeheartedly shared by me with Bow).

[W]e have a prime minister who seeks to suspend the work of parliament — not, as it could have been argued last year, to establish a seven week cooling period before facing the prospect of changing a government in the middle of an economic crisis, but to thwart the work of various committees asking questions in the name of accountability. This is a prime minister who has defied the principle of parliamentary supremacy, ignoring a direct order by vote of parliament to turn over uncensored documents to a parliamentary committee for investigation, in order to save his own political skin. Whatever high ideals the move to suspend parliament last year might have had, they’re not present here. The move is nakedly political, and shames our democracy.

Step by step, this prime minister who campaigned on establishing a new era of transparency and accountability, has sought to strip away the very checks and balances he promised to reinforce. If Canadians are cynical about their political institutions, it’s because political accountability has been removed by successive Liberal and Conservative governments, and we should care about the actions taken here because Stephen Harper clearly wants to make the situation worse, not better.

Mr. Ignatieff, this is your moment. You either step up, or you let the prime minister walk all over you. And if you do the latter, and Mr. Harper gets away with his anti-democratic acts, ultimately, you will have no one to blame but yourself.